The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.
There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state.
Popularity, next to virtue and wisdom, ought to be aimed at; for it is the dictate of wisdom, and is necessary to the practice of virtue inmost.
You are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy. I would therefore have given more power to the President and less to the Senate.
I am a revolutionary, so my son can be a farmer, so his son can be a poet.
It would be an absurdity for jurors to be required to accept the judge’s view of the law, against their own opinion, judgment, and conscience.
But America is a great, unwieldy Body. Its Progress must be slow. It is like a large Fleet sailing under Convoy. The fleetest Sailors must wait for the dullest and slowest. Like a Coach and six-the swiftest Horses must be slackened and the slowest quickened, that all may keep an even Pace.
A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man.
Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy.
I shall have the liberty to think for myself.
If it be the pleasure of Heaven that my country shall require the poor offering of my life, the victim shall be ready, at the appointed hour of sacrifice, come when that hour may. But while I do live, let me have a country, and that a free country!
Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.
In general, our generals were outgeneralled.
Mr. Adams, describing a conversation with Jonathan Sewall in 1774, says: “I answered that the die was now cast; I had passed the Rubicon. Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.”
Vanity, I am sensible, is my cardinal vice and cardinal folly; and I am in continual danger, when in company, of being led an ignis fatuus chase by it.
The ten commandments and the sermon on the mount contain my religion.
The divine science of government is the science of social happiness, and the blessings of society depend entirely on the constitutions of government.
The universal object and idol of men of letters is reputation.
One sailor will do us more good than two soldiers.
We shall convince France and the world, that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and a sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest.